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2000 How Much Publicness Can A City Tolerate (english).pdf

24.01.2004

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"All graffiti must be removed from doors and buildings in Rotterdam", says a furious Huib de Jong in the Rotterdamse Dagblad (23-2-2000) with reference to the tagging of the Art-building in the Witte de Withstraat. According to De Jong, architect and property owner, the art zone around the Witte de Withstraat has come into the grasp of visual degeneration. Located in the marked building are the art centre Witte de With and the exhibition space TENT.. As part of an exhibition, one of the participants had equipped the outer wall of the Art-building with a slogan. Not an artistic (master)piece but a common example of old-skool tagging, which aroused the irritation of many a home-owner and art lover. The tags on the outer wall were defended by Arno van Roosmalen, co-ordinator of TENT. who made a counterattack against De Jong: "We are organising an exhibition here on contemporary city developments and graffiti is a typical public art form. Graffiti is one of the last ways in which people can express themselves publicly".

Indeed the advance of the tag is unstoppable. Anyone who takes the underground in the direction of Ommoord and Zevenkamp is confronted with the concrete guest book of Rotterdam, in which thousands of writers leave their show-piece to the city every day. For some time now it has not been a matter of a small limited graffiti scene: graffiti turns out to be an accessible democratic medium, which is democratised further and further or levelled out if you will. On the website of the urban explorer from Rotterdam Petr Kazil, an anonymous American writes: "I was in Rotterdam last week and was shocked: the graffiti in your city is much worse than in my hometown Louisville, Kentucky. What's more, there's even more graffiti than in Atlanta or Chicago. In this respect Rotterdam can only be compared with New York. Moreover your graffiti hardly has an artistic dimension - tagging is the order of the day: street kids chalking their names on buildings, garbage cans and subway stations. Ridiculous!"

The Rotterdamse Dagblad (14-3-2000) made known that Hoogvliet, a town that is part of the municipality of Rotterdam, removed over two thousand square metres of graffiti last year. With the arrest of eleven culprits - between the ages of thirteen and eighteen - the police hopes to have dealt a heavy blow to random spraying. Even so people realise that the campaign against graffiti is a hopeless undertaking: after all every writer gets a kick out of putting graffiti on places where the old tags have just been removed. In Hoogvliet but also in Pernis and Spijkenisse, an actual 'War on Tags' has developed where video cameras, photographic images and even specialised security assistants have to optimise the tracking and spotting of graffiti.

The situation in Rotterdam is exemplary for all contemporary cities. In December 1995 the regional advisory committee 'Berlin gegen Gewalt' organised a workshop on the possibilities and limits of preventive measures against graffiti. Counts and estimates show that Berlin has over 15.000 writers and that their number is still growing. A number of international experts was heard including Andre Kegge, manager of the Public works department in Rotterdam and specifically put in charge of the fight against graffiti. Graffiti is an age-old phenomenon, but until the Seventies the medium had its technological limits. We know of chalk and crayon on walls and streets, texts written with a stick in soot, dust or sand, writing with fingers on steamed up windowpanes. A little rain and the tags disappeared like snow in summer. But in the Seventies it really went the wrong way. New architectural styles and techniques often made use of large synthetic plates which were a great base for graffiti. Moreover, in the same period chalk and crayon made way for new durable materials like the felt-tip pen and subsequently the spray can. Kegge opposes the sociological approach to graffiti where tagging is considered as an expression of youth culture. "Graffiti is connected with a deep-seated destructiveness and therefore deserves criminal prosecution". In Rotterdam he distinguishes five different graffiti scenes: gangs of youths, occasional sprayers, political and racist activists, urban explorers and pseudo-artists. Graffiti, he continues, can not be tolerated under any circumstances. Although at best he typifies graffiti as pseudo-art, he appeals to an artistic code of honour: designers and architects own the copyright on their designs of their buildings. No artist has the right to harm or modify the design of a colleague. Also graffiti probably contributes to feelings of insecurity. After all, plastered tunnels or squares are considered scary places by the public.

In spite of the repressive and preventive policy against graffiti, in the 21st century Rotterdam has become a 'tag city' par excellence. Graffiti will not let itself be suppressed. We have become so familiar with graffiti in the public space that the question whether tags are beneficial or harmful to the community hardly gets asked anymore. In Die Zeit (34, 1998) Hanno Rauterberg writes strikingly: "Of course graffiti is awful and sometimes hopelessly annoying. And it has nothing to do with art. But however you feel about it and no matter how violently you fight it, the city really will not change by it. The countless tags and 3D letter designs have outgrown their trendy underground status. Graffiti is a stubborn phenomenon, with which we have long since learned to live".

Also Andre Kegge gets annoyed at the fact that the inhabitants of Rotterdam hardly take offence at graffiti. Junkies, tramps, dog shit, noise nuisance, scattered garbage and double-parking, so a local survey shows, were much higher on the list of complaints in Rotterdam. In its wake, the police in Hoogvliet grumbles that the especially introduced complaints service is hardly made use of. With it tagging is an accepted social phenomenon, which makes a specific fight almost impossible.

Graffiti may look like an accepted social phenomenon, the criminalization of writers and taggers nevertheless continues unabatedly. On one of the many graffiti sites an anonymous writer agitates against this continuous criminalization: "If there was no graffiti, there would be much more violence in the streets. Instead of a gun you can also use the spray can or your record players. Moreover, most crews are informal and non-hierarchic in make-up. They generally aren't up for the defending or expansion of a territory, but give voice to friendship and respect". That same writer then makes a distinction between three different groups of taggers. His classification differs from the one by Kegge because as an insider he emphasises internal trends. First of all he mentions the mobile writers without a centre and territory. They show a predilection for mobility and regard underground railways and stations as a suitable medium. Next he points out the writers of the homogeneous neighbourhoods, who wallow in territorial and sometimes even racist tags. Finally he distinguishes the aggressive, often political writers who hang around in a marginal area between two or more rival territories. They agitate against the closed and intolerant nature of the tags surrounding them.

In her lucid essay Art Crimes (1996) Sara Rudin writes that the debate on graffiti centres on matters like crime prevention, pollution and vandalism but that the most important issue remains ignored: "What all discussions on graffiti have in common is a fierce debate on public space and public order. Who manages and controls the public space? That what we euphemistically call 'public space' is in fact an urban iconographic landscape which is coloured and dominated by commercial symbols, logos, slogans, brand names, neon, ad-vertising and bill boards - the unasked-for graffiti of the post-modern era. Kids who put their tags and logos on walls don't see their action as a desecration of the public space, but on the contrary as an improvement. In a society where advertising campaigns, lifestyles, brands and logos determine the dignity and identity of people, young people seek refuge in the personal brand or personal logo".

After Rudin has established that the vast majority of writers are actually opposed to street violence, she wonders why they are still regarded as a violent threat to the community. For this she turns for support to culture critic Stephan Duncombe who interprets graffiti as a sign of alienation, as a cry for help from young people in run-down areas. Writers present us with the question: who are the real villains of the public space? I myself doubt the validity of this Marxist thesis of alienation but I share Duncombe and Rudin's presuppositions.

German journalist Hanno Rauterberg shares that opinion as well: "Behind the fight against graffiti lies the question what the city and the public space still have to offer us today". Public space, he continues, has been past its prime for a long time. A megalomaniac private city development, the tightening up of the public order, the installing of security cameras, the removal of junkies, whores, tramps and skaters have totally restrained the public space.

Against the rise of the closed city, the writer argues for the open city. Graffiti is a way of life: "The writer is the flaneur of the 21st century. He enjoys movement and considers the city to be a theatre in which he acts dressed to the nines. For the writer the city is a meeting place, but also a medium in which he can participate. He lives in anonymity but makes himself known constantly. The boundaries between privacy and publicity are ignored and constantly crossed: everything is private and everything is public. Writers make a city readable, bring a city to life, allow a city to speak for itself".

Another author, Wolfgang Witte, accounts for the love of logos and making the city readable from the intrinsic connection of graffiti with hip-hop. For hip-hop, culture is based on two motives: respect and reputation. Both motives are of an intercultural nature and make graffiti into a multicultural medium with a universal language. According to Witte, in Berlin Turks and Arabs are equally part of the culture of graffiti. Illustrative is a statement by Ozan, the Turkish rapper from Berlin and part of the hip-hop posse Cartel: "We aren't Germans and aren't Turks. We are a strange kind of in-between. You must use that schizophrenia well if you want to get ahead". People aren't one or the other but an in-between, an alien. Writers are part of an alien-nation.

Like the thought of alienation is always related to a notion of a lost originality, alien-nation is related to a future, virtual originality: that of the outsider-insider or alien. Writers and taggers are in-betweens who stay in a space where privacy and publicity have merged. In their remix of identity and reality they bring the ironic slogan philosopher Henk Oosterling once uttered, into play: 'Design, outcasts of the earth!'

The fight against graffiti is therefore a hopeless battle against a mature population that wants to design itself. Like the 'War on Drugs', that War can never be won. More than that, the 'War on Tags' seems to promote a further politicising of subcultures, case in point being the international success of the Reclaim the Streets campaigns, Street Raves and clandestine sound systems. In this sense the advance of the old-skool tag is a sign of a participation in the debate on the loss of the public space and the loss of privacy getting louder and louder. While the public space evaporates further and further, tags make the streets more and more public: how much publicness can a city today still tolerate?

translation: Brenda Wilgerson

siebe (dot) thissen (at) planet (dot) nl

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